Abstract
Diversity in the characteristics of political leaders increases the quality of policy, perceptions of legitimacy, and accountability to constituents. Yet, increasing leaders’ diversity proves one of the most difficult challenges facing modern democracy. Efforts like gender quotas shift descriptive representation on the targeted characteristic, but critics argue that women selected via quotas are as homogenous as those selected via traditional methods. In this article, we theorize that quotas (re)conceptualize views of potential political leaders and transform party recruitment networks. In doing so, quotas increase the diversity of all leaders in office. We evaluate these claims with a new measure of diversity and a data set of over 1,700 legislators in Argentinian subnational government. We show that quotas increase the professional and personal diversity of women and men in office over time, suggesting that electoral gender quotas transform parties, political networks, and how women (and men) perceive political office.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2020
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1086/708336
Funding Information
Support for this project was provided by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant SES-0921374, the Ora N. Arnold Fellowship, and a Summer Faculty Research Fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky.
Related Content
Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop).
An online appendix with supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/708336. It is also attached to the document downloadable from this record.
Repository Citation
Barnes, Tiffany D. and Holman, Mirya R., "Gender Quotas, Women’s Representation, and Legislative Diversity" (2020). Political Science Faculty Publications. 10.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/polsci_facpub/10
Notes/Citation Information
Published in The Journal of Politics, v. 82, no. 4.
© 2020 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
The copyright holder has granted the permission for posting the article here.